‘Stepping on the teacher’s toes’: student teachers’ experience of a one-year postgraduate teacher training programme

ABSTRACT

Student teachers engaging in periods of training in the classroom, supported by experienced mentors, is an accepted model for teacher training. This qualitative study adopted a descriptive phenomenological approach to establish the lived experience of a group of postgraduate primary student teachers across their teacher training year. A community of practice theoretical lens was applied and findings suggested that in some cases student teachers can be regarded as legitimate peripheral participants (LPP) in a primary school context and learning gains made. However, learning and successful outcomes were still shown to take place even when the student teachers might not be regarded as LLPs. There are therefore limitations to the community of practice model. Attention paid to student teachers’ individual circumstances might better contribute to their self-efficacy and subsequent motivation to enter the teaching profession. There are implications for mentor training and further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Communities of practice
• mentors
• student teachers
• teacher identity
• descriptive phenomenology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anita Backhouse

Anita Backhouse is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Lincoln. She is currently the programme leader for a PGCE (Primary) programme working in partnership with a school-based teacher training provider. She also teaches on the master’s programme and leads the Educational Leadership and Management module. She supervises several doctoral students who either have an interest in teacher recruitment and retention, or in educational leadership and management.

Anita’s doctoral research focused on the experiences of PGCE (Primary) students and adopted a mixed methodology using both statistical and phenomenological approaches. Her other research interests relate to assessment in Higher Education contexts as well as cognitive development in science and mathematics. She recently project managed a four-year large-scale Educational Endowment Foundation project looking at developing a thinking skills intervention programme for secondary science teachers. She is currently project managing a three-year Erasmus+ project to develop a toolkit for assessing thinking skills working with partners in the UK, Latvia and Finland.